The Man Who Became Poems

By Edward O'Dwyer

Edward O’Dwyer offers us irreverent and daring meditations on love and transformation in this masterful collection of short stories. His characters playfully inhabit the space between reality and the absurd ... O’Dwyer’s sparkling gift of prose shines so brightly here. An audacious, tender, and utterly original collection. – Gillian O’Shaughnessy

• Language: English
• Publisher: Limerick Writers Centre
• Release date: Oct 9, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215301463

Book preview

The people didn’t react at all fearfully when the apocalypse came. There was no reason to, because there wasn’t any of the predictable cinematic stuff. There was no fire or rioting or mayhem in the streets when the apocalypse showed up. There were no tsunamis closing in from all sides, none of those histrionics. The apocalypse had grown so weary of the misrepresentations.

It didn’t approach them at all apocalyptically. Instead it was dressed in a full clown suit and make-up.

It walked up the driveway just like a clown coming to a kid’s birthday, keeping an appointment, and that might be just how the apocalypse viewed it, too – it had been called up, its services asked for, arrangements made.

The people opened up the door and greeted the apocalypse because they had seen the colourful suit and floppy shoes and big painted-on smile and then they had heard the door bell ringing.

The apocalypse made the people smile and laugh, made them happy. The people poured beverages and passed around snacks. They were dunking tortilla chips into an array of dips. The kids were allowed fizzy drinks, a treat.

The apocalypse knew its audience. It had the people right where it wanted them. That’s precisely why it put on the costume and learned to make balloon animals. The apocalypse squirted water at the people from a flower on its lapel and the cheers grew and grew. It didn’t want to be that cliché of the apocalypse, didn’t want to be running around and frantically shouting I am the apocalypse into the people’s faces.

It started out that way but then, through the laughter, bit by tiny bit, the apocalypse began to reveal more of itself. Even the apocalypse has to be itself, in the end, and this was its come-back, its rebound shot. The laughing and joking faded out and the sounds of anguish faded in. The people were crying. They were despairing. They were holding on tightly to their loved ones.

Still, the apocalypse was an extraordinarily professional clown. It stayed perfectly in character as it started to pull a red tissue from its pocket and hand it to the people to tend to their tears. Tied to the red one was a green one, then a blue one, and then a yellow one. The apocalypse kept pulling on the tissue and more and more of it kept appearing from the deep and seeming endlessness of its clown’s pocket, which from the outside looked to be an average, ordinary pocket.

The people gratefully took the tissue from the apocalypse. They were all in this together, after all. They knew the score. They watched on as the colourful tissue came flowing from the pocket, and there was no need for pushing and shoving. The apocalypse kept smiling for the people, and they all knew in their hearts that there’d be enough for everybody.

The Woman Who Jogged At Sunrise

The woman thought about the word free. Her first thought was of getting something without having to pay money for it, and she was disturbed by this.

There’s something very wrong about that, she thought. This just isn’t what the word is supposed to mean.

She flung an expensive handbag into the river as she thought this, and she watched as it bobbed on the current and floated away, eventually shrinking from sight. Some expensive makeup also floated away. A brand new iPhone floated away. Even the woman’s credit card floated away.

Free, she said to the wind, but the wind just shrugged, because that’s more or less all the wind ever does. You can always count on the wind’s indifference.

She didn’t feel any freer, however.

She looked up into the sky but the answer wasn’t written there. There were only the usual clouds huddled together like they’re waiting for a bus, or whatever the equivalent is that clouds gather and wait for. The woman went out running the next morning. She didn’t know why, but that’s what she did. She knew on some instinctive level that is what she wanted to do.

She wore no clothes, no shoes, just her skin. It was very early and the sun was rising. She felt the first of the day’s warmth alight on her. No curtains twitched. Everybody in the neighbourhood was still asleep, adjusting their stiff limbs, and wrapped inside puffy duvets.

The weeks passed and the woman did this every day, went running without her clothes. It was a kind of singing. She didn’t know why, but she felt it was. She was singing. It was a time of the day when everything was a kind of singing, perhaps. The birds were singing. The flowers and trees were singing. The future was singing. And so the woman, out jogging nakedly, was also singing.

This is what it means to be free, the woman thought while out jogging, while the sun was peeping over the horizon and prodding at her bare legs. It’s all coming back to me.

Other people started joining in once they noticed the woman. They wondered what they were missing. People always wonder what they are missing, and so, more naked joggers started to appear out and about in the earliest hours of the morning. The woman had to share the first light of day, the scent of dew, and the melodies of blackbirds.

Before too long the whole town had joined her. Everyone was feeling free. And everyone’s body, too, was a song being sung.

After a time, though, the woman began to feel captive inside her own body. She had the impression that it might all be the wrong way around, and so she flipped her body inside out. The woman wore all of her cells and sinews and veins and internal organs on the outside. She went jogging again and a sense of freedom she had never known came over her.

Her skin had been overprotective. It had coddled her. It had held her back. She understood it all so much clearer once she had flipped her body inside out.

Look, one of the townspeople said. She’s turned herself inside out.

We’re missing out, I’m sure of it, another said.

She’s right. Our skins are holding us back, a third called out. The people of the town all watched the woman and agreed how majestic she was, how much more beautiful she was now. They looked at their own personal dungeons in their bathroom mirrors that night and they knew the truth: that the best dungeons hide the very fact of their being dungeons. The woman had taught them that, and it wasn’t long before the others began to flip themselves inside out. It wasn’t long before everybody in town was inside out, and they were all joining the woman each morning to jog, inside out, at sunrise, all of their organs singing out into the day like a choir.

The woman was happy for them, she really was, but it didn’t stop her feeling as though she wasn’t as free anymore as she could be. It’s still a prison, all of this stuff, she thought, meaning her body, and felt sad.

She thought about how she had made her prison wide and sprawling, and how what it was hadn’t changed, and so she stripped away all of the meat and bones from herself. It had to be done. She saw no other option.

The next morning the woman went jogging. The sun rose and the woman was just a moving shimmer beneath it. What she was sang as the warmth of its poking fingers tickled her, and she shimmered all the more for it.

It doesn’t get any freer than this, she understood. She was truly free, she knew. All the townspeople, still turned inside out and feeling free, stopped jogging as soon as they saw the shimmer. They all stood still and watched it go by. No one spoke as it did. They all understood that the shimmer was the woman. They all silently agreed that she was utterly free, utterly beautiful.

My Father’s Coffin

I can remember watching it all, and yes, being fascinated by the spectacle, its improbability. I can remember so vividly, he and a few of the neighbours bringing it in, how they had it hoisted onto their shoulders, and how sweat gleamed on their brows and their shirts began to cling to them, patches of sticky translucence appearing and darkening. I can remember the sound of heavy breath, their exertion.

Mother was standing next to me at the time, but not facing it, not at first. She turned around to see what all the commotion was. There was no shortage of it.

They set it down on the kitchen table, which I had only just cleared and was about to set with plates and cutlery for dinner. I can remember some hands reaching for the wall, men rebalancing themselves. There was weight in it, of course.

I looked at my father’s coffin, and then I looked at my father. He was in the prime of his life, or at least not very much beyond its prime, not enough to make a point of it. I watched him as he stood back and grinned at it, admiring it the way men in films admire a new sports car or a beautiful woman in a billowy dress welcoming the wind’s flirtations.

My father was making plans to be dead, it seemed.

It may seem a very ludicrous thing for a healthy man to shop for his own coffin, and then for him to grin so admiringly at it, the way he did, but my father had always been capable of doing ludicrous things, and so the word hardly applied to him or the things he did anymore.

I remember the neighbours all left to hearty thanks from him. They all flapped and waved their hands in the air to receive his gratitude, and then they filed out, fanning themselves, making sure it was known that they had perspired on his account.

It was the three of us left in the kitchen, then. A family.

I have imagined those men, once outside, the door closing and sealing us inside, their laughter as one of them mentions something about my father needing that coffin sooner than he bargained for. I have imagined them all laughing at this the way only a group of men can laugh, as though they are trying to shake the hills sitting immovably in the distance.

I was eight years old, much too young to be watching my father grinning so happily at his own coffin. Nonetheless, these are the simple facts of the